On windows, with "stock" PHP 5.1.2, there is no set_charset function at all. One may have to replace php_mysqli.dll, and libmysql.dll with proper versions, which provided by MySQL at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php/

Note that using utf8mb4 with this function may cause this function to return false, depending on the MySQL client library compiled into PHP. If the client library is older than the introduction of utf8mb4, then PHP's call of the libraries 'mysql_set_character_set' will return an error because it won't recognise that character set.

The only way you will know there's an error is by checking the return value, because PHP warnings are not emitted by this function.mysqli_error will return something like:"Can't initialize character set utf8mb4 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/)"(I don't think the directory has anything to do with it; I think the utf8mb4 vs utf8 distinction is handled internally)

A workaround is to recall with utf8, then do a 'SET NAMES' query with utf8mb4.

If your MySQL server is configured to use utf8 by default, then you may not notice any of this until you get obscure bugs. It seems it will still save into the database correctly in terms of bytes. However, you may get "Data too long for column" errors if you are truncating strings to fit fields, because from MySQL's point of view during the length check every 4-byte character will actually be multiple individual characters. This caused me hours of debugging.